Train Tedious Tasks
“Amateurs practice until they get it right while professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong."
In my fairly limited and long since removed time as a tactical professional, I consistently appreciated one commonality that separated the survivability and lethality of operational units and the individuals within them - The humility and tolerance to rehearse the most tedious of tasks.
The most effective soldiers understood that the cost of failing, learning, and leaning into the discomfort of improving execution of often mundane and cumbersome skills within the forgiveness of training would save them time, physical energy, and mental acuity when facing real world scenarios. I have witnessed those savings paying dividends within the much less forgiving confines of combat.
The Weakest Link
We have all heard the cliche, “You don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training.” This expression is typically paired with imagery depicting individuals performing high skill and high effort endeavors like target practice and tire flips. It’s less often connected to the far from sexy training that addresses the weakest link, like magazine changes within target practice or improving hip mobility for positional integrity during tire flips.
At the individual level, warfighters need to invest time in honing the boring but essential elements of their craft.
How quickly can you blindly change the batteries in your electronic pieces of equipment? Can you manipulate your radio, setting it up without the help of an RTO? Can you name the items in your buddy’s aid pouch and access them without white light? Can you perform routine maintenance on the vehicles you ride? Do you know how to perform disassembly, assembly, and a functions check on crew served weapons used by your unit? Do you perform immediate action on your primary weapon system or do you transition to your secondary weapon system? How quickly can you fix the malfunction or transition weapons?
Training the examples provided above is far from exciting. However, it’s representative of the types of individual responsibilities that trip warfighters up on the battlefield. You’ll likely never notice these tasks when they’re executed smoothly but they’ll be glaring, sometimes even deadly, deficiencies when they’re insufficiently trained. I rather accidentally discharge my taclite due to lack of familiarization while patrolling the woods behind the barracks than on a blacked out exfil HLZ in the middle of an open field.
An Absolute Unit
I always appreciated that the platoons and squads I worked in were never too cool to train the simple shit.
Admittedly, there were plenty of times I questioned my life choices when it was 2am, raining, cold, and I could feel my fingers while we were hooking up tow bars to Strykers for the 7th time that night. I can still vividly remember myself and another team leader ignoring noise discipline in favor of screaming at each other until our platoon sergeant stepped in to diffuse the situation and somehow keep from killing us both… But those practice reps provided an unmatched level of competence and confidence that every member of our platoon could almost subconsciously conduct any aspect of Stryker recovery under awful conditions.
Without naming names, there was another organization we bailed out during a mission because they had failed to prepare for vehicle recovery. I got the sense that culturally they felt they were too good for spending time doing tedious tasks in training. Conversely, I’ve witnessed extremely seasoned and skilled operational units rehearse seemingly simple tactics.
The military loves to make “masters” of those who get it right after a two week course and a test that focuses more on the outcome than the process. Mastery is a relentless eternal pursuit of enhanced execution. And individual mastery is not enough to accomplish the mission.
A collective willingness to endure the beating monotony and scorching discomfort of thorough preparation is necessary for forging the unit capable of winning the battles that win a war.
Endex
The beauty of rehearsing is that it exposes shortcomings and spotlights sometimes subtle opportunities for enhancing techniques, skills, tactics, and strategy. You might find something as simple as a squeaky ladder in need of WD40 or you might find something as serious as your hydraulic buffer not providing enough power to feed hollow-point rounds into the chamber of your primary weapon system. Blowing the breach is sexy but it doesn’t happen without aligning and executing all the unspoken details that precede it.
